Plastic thoughts

Here is an interesting website. Send it around to raise awareness.

Here's another one. There are many interesting statistics and lots of info on this site about plastic, aluminum and glass.

A few quick stats:

In 2006 36 BILLION (plastic) bottles of water were sold in the US. That is approximately 4 billion pounds of plastic (just from water bottles). Add to that soda and juice bottles, and the salad type containers from the previous blog, and the numbers get kind of heady.

According to some reports a one-liter plastic water bottle uses 1/4-liter of oil to produce.

And now a chart:

Recycling Rates by Material and Class, 2006

		Aluminum cans	PET plastic bottles	Glass bottles	Total
11 Deposit states	Carbonated	78.7%	71.2%	72.7%	76.1%
	Non-carbonated	49.3%	35.2%	36.4%	36.9%
	Average	75.8%	44.4%	63.6%	61.4%
39 Non-Deposit States	Carbonated	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
	Non-carbonated	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
	Average	35.1%	13.6%	12.4%	24.2%
US Total	Carbonated	45.4%	27.0%	29.4%	36.9%
	Non-carbonated	42.1%	21.5%	21.4%	29.0%
	Average	45.2%	23.5%	27.8%	34.7%

23% of PET plastic on average. Not good. 

Now the good news. Some legislation is being passed to try to stem this ugly plastic tide. See this website to find out if your state is included and what they are doing.

Ok, enough stats for today. Thanks for reading.